Patty Ho Design | Web Interactive Designer

Do you design with a grid system?

In graphic design, we learn to layout using a certain grid system, so all the element on the page are align properly and provides a better visual flow.  This goes the same to web design. Screen might not be a print magazine but it still applies the basic grid system.

One of my coworker sent me a link to ‘960 Grid System‘ site. This is probably one of the best link that I have came across so far.

960 Grid system site provides you templates to download for your Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign,Inscape, Omnigraffle, Visio, fireworks, and Expression Design.

I personally use Photoshop to mock up my websites. This grid template is very handy because all the guide lines are lined up for you already. This makes my design to be easier because I have something that I can reference to in terms of alignment. If you have never try to design with a grid, well, I guess it’s about time for you to start. 960.gs !

‘Patty, you are such a machine!’

This is often the compliment I got from my manager and the people I work with. They are referring that I always turn over the work so quickly that I work just as fast as a machine.

I am not a machine but I try to work efficiently. (more…)

As I am working my way on thestar.com’s new redesign. We encountered one major issue with the new advertising sizes that are aligned with Online Publishers Association.

Push down  – 970 pixel x 418 pixel

XXL box – 468 pixel x 648 pixel

Fixed Panel – 336 pixel x 860 pixel

We contracted out our new design to an outside company. Great, the new design already taken place, so how are we gonna implement the new design without disturbing the existing template?

Take a look of the new design layout wireframe.

new thestar.com layout

The new design will be a 3 column layout. We will always have a leaderboard and a big box on the page.  The content will follow by a major headline story and then a list of story line up. Everything looks good except the new humongous ads sizes break all the layout rule.

Problem: The new ad sizes does not fit with the new design! As always that advertiser wants their ad above-the-fold to get exposure.  Our design was created and built before those new ad sizes. And of course the outside company is not gonna go back to the layout mode unless we slap them with more cash.

Solution: Tweak the layout in the most minimal way and keep everything on the page identical. In order to cut down the developer’s work, I had to take the existing layout and tweak the most minimal way so that we won’t need to touch the majority of the existing CSS stylesheet.

Push down advertising is the easiest to mock up because all you need is to push down all the content below navigation. Then again, it’s so huge that you can’t ignore.

Push Down 970pixel x 418pixel

Here’s a real example from businessinsider.com for push down advertisting.

Push Down Ad closed mode

Push Down Ad open mode

XXL Ad gives me a headache. Ideally, we want to keep our 3 column layout, but this nasty size literally takes up half of the website width!!! So I had to reorganize the headline story content and have it share space with the XXL ad in it’s own box and push everything down.

XXL Box Ad (468 pixel x 648 pixel)

Finally, the fixed panel. The width of fixed panel is 336pixel. It is literally 36 pixel wider than our right rail, which has our big box ad and all the related contents. And with 860pixel in height, there’s no way the headline story abstract can show that much copy to accommodate the height. Therefore I had to bring some story line up and shrink the width in order to accommodate the odd width size.

Fixed Panel Ad 336 pixel x 860 pixel

So why those large ad? I guess the advertisers are now aware the demand for premium inventory, and not just blinking skyscraper anymore.

businessinsider.com believes the following reasons why advertisers want to move away from just banners:

• If advertisers really want to buy banners, they’ll do it for cheaper through an ad network.
• Banners are too easy to ignore. Demand-generation ads need to interrupt content (like they do everywhere but online).
• When people think of the banner, they think of a blinky, subprime mortgage ad where you have to shoot the duck.

After years of working as designer in the corporate environment, you will notice couple things

• Always design around advertisement
• Always provide the best above the fold exposure for advertisement
• Making online banner ads and sponsored by logo are like daily chore

I am not a big fan of advertisement, but what can you do? it pays everyone’s salary!

Alright, when Rogers started their couch comparision with Bell’s home phone service. I really think the marketing campaign is just BORING.

Rogers Homephone Challenge Couch Comparison

Both companies are money-gauging company so it’s just disgusting for me to even want to look at the ad. However, what it gets interesting is when company is attacking eachother using the same marketing approach.

Bell's couch comparison

This is Bell’s couch comparison Ad that is advertised on today’s Metronews paper. It took the whole spread. It says “You think I am expensive for my homephone service? I have more stuff to offer for the digital TV!”

While those two are fighting for each other. I saw this Ad from Telehop that took the same couch idea and then added their own. It simply says “I am the cheapest for the best offer, sucka!”

Telehop Couch comparison

nice.

Sometimes I check out Information Aesthetics once a while just because it showcases interesting ways how some developers or application handles information visually.

Currently my company is doing a revamp on our biggest news site – thestar.com. With the new design, I can see that we are trying to de-clutter our information display. However, we still can’t get away from our traditional ways of display information.

When I saw this Google newsmap post from Information Aesthetics

It gives the “control” to the users to “discover” the stories vs our traditional ways of controlling the output.

Jeff Veen from Small Batch, Inc., who is also known from WikiRank gave this excellent speech on designing for big data. He clearly stated that giving the control to the users over data is definately the trend and the future of the web. He stated couple important rules about data visualization.

• We are always storytelling our contents, now it’s time to give user control to have them to discover the story
• We provides visual cues for users, now it’s time to make it into tools so that the users can interact and control their cues.
• We provide editing features but now it’s time to give the filtering control to the user to manage the output
  

And this is truly the manner of web 2.0 approach. We are giving the control to the users in a less response time and more interactive way.

Interesting article that I came across from colorlovers.com. It showcases few example of the popular site with color blind filters. There’s this tool called “Color Blind Webpage Filter“, it translate your site into the world as seen by color blind person.

This definately adds a boost to web accessbility. Awesome.

Wall-E and Watchmen meshup…who would thought of it?

I just love the fact that somone blends both trailer together so well. nice job.

Using sitemap as your footer

Awesome show and tell from Web Designer’s Wall. Nick raise a good point using sitemap in the footer. Cut down the clicks, engage interactivity, saves time and enhance page design are all good reasons to design for responsiveness.

20+ cheat sheets for designers

Nothing better than cutting down my production time! Sweet!

Tragic at my condo

Our condo recently just got flooded due to the waterline breakage behind the fridge. We had to remove all the carpet so now we are living on the bare concrete! I had planned to get hardwood floor anywayz, but everything starts one month early! And because we are on the bare concrete, nothing better than just paint the whole place anywayz.

During the painting process, we had to remove our wall shelf in order to get all the area painted. The problem is, after we remove the shelf, the anchor in the drywall is no longer valid! We put the shelf back in, put the stuff back on, and then “whomp”, everything comes back down plus adding holes to the drywall. Argh.

Now we have to patch up the holes, and we can’t install the shelf on the wall again! So what can we do about the shelf? Add few legs to the shelf and make it into a little table to hold the stuff instead.

Handsome makeover for ugly AC unit

This all came from the great inspiration of Ikea Hacker blog.  I randomly check this site for inspiration. I do agree that IKEA’s stuff is never really that durable, but IKEA is everywhere (and probably the cheapest for the design that they offer)! And because all the furniture came in pieces, you can reuse those pieces and make it to something else. It’s brilliant!

This guy transformed his ugly AC unit into a handsome furniture piece that adds accent to the place. It’s just beautiful!

And someone put together Vika Fintorp leg and Lack shelf to make a slim entry table. It’s also brilliant!

This is far the best hack I’ve seen. Salad Bowl Speakers. Who would thought of a salad bowl can be turned into something sexy.

Home improvement is one of my 2009 goal, and it’s literally taking half of my free time to accomplish it. Think outside of the box is what I say to myself all the time, but most of the time I still think inside of the box. lol

Interesting, I was just checking CSS vault for their update on the CSS galleries. I saw this  Organic Food supermarket, it caught my attention due to it’s richness in terms of layout and color.

What I find intersting is that their navigation and headings are replaced with images right after the page is loaded.

After just sniffing through codes to find out how they did it. This is the site I came across.  “Facelift image replacement” A nifty script that turns your fonts into display types as image format.

So far I am not quite sure how reliable of this script is although you actually pay for “premium” service for $1 a month.

I can see they have came out with FIR wordpress plugin for this script.

So has anyone wondered about the SEO for this script? I haven’t found any documentation or anything states on the website indicating if Google will crawl those text that had been replaced with images.

Another images replace technique that has been implemented in our new ourfaves.com website is sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement).

What sIFR does is to replace the text with Swf that has been created dynamically. It overlays on top of the original text and the text can be selected and copied. And if the user doesn’t have flash player installed. The text just simply won’t get replaced.

Sometimes I wonder if I should use those script to enhance the look of my design. Sometimes I also wonder if adding those script will increase the load time for the users?  Sure, it makes the site look so much nicer, but do I really want to sacrifice the response time? Another great post that I read the other day is Speed in Software design. It mentioned how we should cut down response time and eliminate steps.  It emphasize that we should “Design for responsiveness!”

I typically kept my design flexible and easy to update without going through so much trouble. That’s why I kept everything system fonts and scalable backgrounds.

And please keep in mind, those image replacements are only good for short and large display fonts. It’s always better to keep the body fonts to either Verdana (if it’s under 11pixel in size) or Arial, Helvetica (if it’s over 12 pixel in size), just for the sake of legibility.

Luc from Spicywebdesigner.com sent me an email the other day that he would like to interview me about how I get to be who I am today.

Take a look of the interview here:

http://spicywebdesigners.com/2009/01/spicy-web-designer-interview-with-patty-ho/